Online Paid Surveys. Beware!

My name is Sam, I am 20 years old. Being young I’m a big fan of “easy money” so I looked into online money making methods. How disappointing it turned out to be. Why is this you may be asking? Well, initially it was simple. I was grabbed by websites claiming large amounts of money in small amounts of time.

My first encounter trying to make money online was with paid surveys. What a complete waste of time! I spent a long time reading up, making sure I wasn’t signing up to scam sites. So, having found a list of reputable sites I signed up! I’d read good things about how simple paid surveys where, so I was quite excited to finally get going.

I filled out survey after survey, keen to earn as much as possible. However, I soon realised that I wasn’t being paid with cash, but with entries into prize draws. Hardly what I was hoping for.
Needless to say I only stuck with paid surveys for about one week before I thought these aren’t really worth the time they take (some of which took nearly half an hour!).

Two things annoyed me most about paid survey sites:

1) The amount of personal information they require. I’m not sure about you, but I do not like giving out my address to loads of different sites, but it doesn’t stop there. These sites will ask for your parents/housemates/children’s information too, this includes their salaries, job type, interest etc. All rather private stuff. You might not bother to enter this data, but the more info they have on you, the more surveys they send your way. Now, if you think that you want to make as much money as possible and sign up to numerous sites, then that’s a lot of sites with all your details. Not to mention, how tedious it is to enter it in the first place.

2) The number of emails they send you. A word of warning: if you’re going to do this, set up a new email address especially for the surveys. Each site you register with will email you to inform you about new surveys for you to complete. This quickly becomes a large number of emails each day, clogging your inbox. You might think this is a good thing; more emails, more surveys, more money. This is not the case. Before you commence each survey you will have to complete a mini-survey to make sure you are eligible for the proper survey. This can dramatically lower the number of surveys you can complete.

The good thing about paid surveys is that you shouldn't have to pay to take part in them.

So, all-in-all not really a success, but at least I hadn’t lost any money.